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Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Thoughts on Railfan Publishing
Over at TheDomeCar@yahoogroups, Mark Perry recently brought up the subject of the future of railfan oriented publications such as TRAINS Magazine or Railfan and Railroad. Many of my comments here are based on a compilation of the posts I have made at The Dome Car; for a fuller exploration of the topic, I encourage you to join the list and plunge into the discussion. Labels: Journalism, Photography, Railroads
Mark's post was inspired by a conversation with a twentysomething railfan he met while trackside. Amongst the younger photographer's remarks:What he did say that captured his attention was of course, the Internet, he said everything you want to know about or see, is on there for only the cost of your monthly internet charge. He mentioned that he had seen or had been on the "other car" discussion group but was turned off by the bragging and bitching going on there???? He had not seen or heard of The Dome Car. He surfs RailPictures quite a bit but does not submit.
Of the magazines he did say he liked, bought and looked forward to seeing, were those special edition issues being put out by TRAINS. The two magazines that I remember him mentioning were, DIESEL VICTORY and LOCOMOTIVE
The comments regarding the net are somewhat amusing to me, and pose a double-edged sword. Although the net is a powerful tool, there is much it lacks. Show me where you can get serious, scholarly historical themed articles online? Show me where you can find in-depth reporting with interviews with principles of major railroads and transportation agencies? Show me where you can find more than a handful of rich, well designed, well edited, well written photo essays? You can find a lot of photos, and you can find a lot of small news snippets, and you can find a lot of rumor, and even more speculation and bitchy arguing.
Sandy Mitchell, who owns The Dome Car, added the following as part of his response to the question:Nowadays, based on my somewhat limited trackside experiences of late, I'm inclined to believe that the divide begins not with Trains-versus-Railfan-versus-RI/PTJ, but between those willing to read paper versus those entirely online....
It may be easy for us to wave our hands dismissively and say "aw, those young punks'll come around", but to be honest, I'm not so sure. We are indeed entering a different era, where railroads seemingly try to hide from the public instead of doing public relations, and where railroad accessibility is seemingly nonexistent in many regions. (I vividly contrast the reception I receive from railroaders in the middle of the Arizona desert with what I get in the urban Northeast.) I repeatedly tell everyone who will listen that the Internet is doing to America in the early 2000s what the railroads did in the mid-nineteenth century -- utterly changing the ways Americans (and, of course, Europeans, Asians, Africans, etc.) live, work, do business, eat, socialize, etc. And it's changing the way we railfan and relate to railroads as well--imagine what a hopeless fantasy train-simulator software and hardware in your own home would have been in the 1970s.
I think Sandy hits it right on the head.
I kind-of straddle the two camps. One one hand, I was in many ways the last of the pre-net generation. I learned my photography on an old brass (heavy as a tank!) GAF 35mm SLR, and my first real camera was a Pentax K1000. I came of age with computers but without the net. I began subscribing to TRAINS at about 16 and kept it up for years and years, skimming each issue in hopes of learning the latest doings in my neck of the woods. Yet as soon as I gained the net, I really plunged in. I invested in Wifi from day one of being plugged on the net at home. I joined eleventeen-thousand Yahoo lists. I started a railfan webzine which had a healthy but excessively exhausting two year run. Looking at my contemporaries in my generation and those of the younger one who I socialize with, the ideas of the twentysomething railfan that Mark talked to are extremely familiar, and I am sympathetic with them.
I had the pleasure of working for TRAINS routinely for about two years, and those years taught me that there's still a lot that the traditional publishing model can bring to the table that has value. But even so, consumers don't always make rational decisions; short attention spans combined with the net's "cost-plus-free" instant gratification are potent factors.
I suspect there are some business models for paper printing that will survive. Certainly amongst those of us snobby enough to think higher of our photos than snapshots, the ego stroking of being published appeals. Plus there's the less egotistical finickiness of wanting a printed, high quality image rather than pixels on a screen.
The fact remains, however, that most young people have the net at their finger tips, every day, 24 hours a day, and generally on their parent's or school's dime. They tend to shoot digital, making electronic transfer one click and no dollars away. Unlike the 1960s, 70s, 80s, or early 90s, they don't perceive a need for print as a source of news, and likely don't care about in-depth analysis that publishing-quality writers increasingly must provide. Bottom line: they don't need print, like many of us did.
The net also provides something that I occasionally -- no, frequently -- lament, that print doesn't in a significant way: the ability to participate in the medium. On paper, this was limited to either writing the editor a letter and hoping it got published, or writing a story or sending in a photo for publication and crossing ones fingers. On the net though, anyone who can type or can upload a photo -- and thats a really low bar -- can participate directly in "publication". Instead of reading the Professional Iconoclast or Don Phillips, they can strut onto a bulletin board and pretend they are just as knowledgeable. This post for one, and The Dome Car list where the discussion originated for another, are great examples of that. We could never have had this debate on print, short of sending a lot of letters, spending a lot on stamps, and standing at a Xerox for a long, long time. Sure, there's a ton of white noise, but the younger generation has always known it, it doesn't bother them as much because its part of the world they grew up with.
The publishing industry, in general, is on a slow but steady decline, and isn't near bottoming out yet. There is absolutely no good reason to expect these wired, net-raised kids to suddenly wake up one day and go, "hey, I really need to subscribe to Railfan and Railroad!" They might, for the heck of it, because they have extra cash and need something to burn it on. To do that, though, publishers have to be more careful about providing relevant content. Kalmbach, the publisher of TRAINS, seems to be trying the special issue route as an answer and it seems to work for them; there might be other angles. I don't think anyone should get out funeral pyres for publishing. The publishing industry in general, and the railfan publishing industry in specific, will survive. But to do so they will have to adapt, and in a way that goes far beyond just adding a website and putting some "look at our site" pointers in the magazine.
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